Director, Enterprise AI Process & Innovation

Join AstraZeneca: Where AI Meets Life-Changing Impact

Are you ready to turn enterprise AI ambition into repeatable, measurable value that advances how medicines reach patients? Drive significant improvements across our entire value chain, with the executive sponsorship and investment to back it?

As Director, Enterprise AI Process & Innovation, you will lead the translation of strategy into scaled AI outcomes across the company’s most critical end-to-end processes, partnering with senior leaders to focus on the problems that matter and the metrics that prove impact.

You will operate at the intersection of business strategy, AI capability, and enterprise delivery. From first idea to production, you will shape use cases, build and test prototypes, and ensure robust solutions that stand up in real operations. How will you connect generative AI, automation, and advanced analytics to improve speed, quality, cost, and decision confidence across the enterprise?

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set direction, dive into code and data when it accelerates delivery, and guide multi-functional teams through risk, compliance, and adoption. Your work will help the organization move faster, scale what works, and make a tangible difference for patients and colleagues.

Accountabilities:

Business partnership and solution shaping: Serve as a senior, trusted partner to business leaders to identify, shape, and prioritize AI-enabled opportunities across enterprise processes. Translate strategic and operational challenges into clear, outcome-led use cases with success measures and delivery roadmaps, advising on technical trade-offs and risks to enable confident decisions.

Enterprise process transformation with AI: Lead the design and delivery of AI-enabled improvements across end-to-end processes. Embed intelligence, automation, and advanced analytics into workflows to improve speed, quality, cost, and decision effectiveness. Ensure solutions are designed for scale, reuse, robustness, and long-term sustainability.

Technical leadership and hands-on contribution: Engage deeply with AI solutions throughout their lifecycle. Develop or contribute to rapid prototypes and proofs of concept; review and validate model logic, data pipelines, and system behavior, diagnose and resolve complex technical or delivery challenges. Write, review, and refine code, notebooks, pipelines, or configuration artifacts where it accelerates delivery, improves quality, or reduces risk. Provide strong technical leadership to AI engineering and data teams, shaping architecture, delivery approaches, and quality standards, and act as a senior escalation point for high-impact initiatives.

Delivery leadership: Lead multi-disciplinary teams across business, AI engineering, data, technology, change, and risk functions. Own outcomes from concept to production deployment and business adoption, handling risks related to data quality, model performance, production readiness, and technical debt.

Governance, risk, and compliance: Ensure solutions align with enterprise governance, Responsible AI principles, privacy, and regulatory expectations. Partner with Risk, Legal, Quality, and Compliance to embed controls, validation, and monitoring, and contribute to evolving enterprise AI delivery standards, patterns, and operating models.

Capability building: Grow AI literacy and confidence across business and transformation communities. Coach teams on effective collaboration across business and technology, and role-model rigorous, value-led, technically credible enterprise AI delivery.

Essential Skills/Experience:

• Master’s degree in a scientific, engineering, or technical field
• Extensive experience delivering AI products and large-scale transformation in complex large enterprise and regulated environments. 
  Proven ability to excel in senior business and executive-facing contexts including giving engaging engineering technical and comprehensive industry talks 
• Proven ability and evidence of work across the enterprise in varied functions 
• Excellent stakeholder management ability and communication skills 
• Competency in business model and case creation and communication 
• Strong hands-on technical and coding experience, including: 
  • Writing and reviewing production-quality code (e.g. Python, javascript, java) 
  • Working directly with data pipelines, analytical workflows, and machine learning models 
  • Prototyping, testing, and iterating AI solutions from feasibility through to scalable implementation 

• Deep practical understanding of:
  • Machine learning concepts and model lifecycles
  • Generative AI and modern AI architectures
  • Data platforms, performance considerations, monitoring, and failure modes

Desirable Skills/Experience:

• Experience working in environments combining AI engineering, product delivery, and enterprise transformation.
• Familiarity with: Generative AI, LLMs, RAG patterns, and agentic workflows. MLOps / LLMOps practices, model monitoring, and lifecycle management. Knowledge graphs, decision-support systems, or complex analytical platforms
• Experience operating within regulated environments requiring validation, auditability, and quality oversight.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud-based AI tooling and experimentation environments.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

We are AstraZeneca’s Enterprise AI Unit—a global community of people from across the business who are pioneering how AI transforms healthcare. We are building an AI empowered organisation from the ground up, which means we need people from every discipline-scientist, leaders, strategists, operators and technologists—united by a drive to apply AI where it matters most.

If you are ready to lead enterprise-scale AI that delivers measurable business value and meaningful patient impact, send your CV and show us how you will make it real.

#EAI

Date Posted

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AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.